At last month’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, Eleanor Howe, founder and CEO of Diamond Age Data Science, presented the Trends with the Trenches session based on gathered input from colleagues, clients, and advisors across the life sciences field. Coding agents were the central topic—how they’re speeding up software development, open source maintenance, and analysis workflows while also shifting new types of responsibility to the human reviewer. Now, “just coding” is no longer enough, an...

Your AI plan can’t outrun your data. Adam Marko, life science field CTO at Hammerspace, joins the podcast to unpack the problem almost every biotech, pharma, and biomedical research group runs into: unstructured data that are siloed, fragmented, and scattered across storage systems, sites, and clouds. With host Jessica StLouis, they talk through what “data orchestration” means when building an AI-ready data foundation, infrastructure constraints and the tiered storage patterns that help teams...

AI is now good enough to change how computational biology teams actually work, but most companies are still adopting it like it’s 2023. Sonia Timberlake, R&D strategy consultant for Timberlake & Maclsaac Biopharma Consulting, speaks with host Eleanor Howe about what’s real: agentic coding, high-throughput data workflows, and the practical limits that still slow teams down. Timberlake digs into benchmarks for capabilities and end-to-end tasks, as well as multimodal chart understanding,...

Joining Trends from the Trenches is Allissa Dillman, founder and CEO of BioData Sage, and LaFrancis Gibson, manager for health promotion at ORAU, who discuss this year’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Hackathon sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) Training Center. With host Allison Proffitt, they discuss which tools and datasets from CFDE will be part of the Hackathon, who should participate, learning and collaborating beyond datasets and ...

Computing resources are no longer just pieces of tech—they're scientific instruments. Moffitt Cancer Center’s Jarett DeAngelis, director of scientific information technology, and Shane Corder, senior HPC engineer, join cohost Jessica StLouis, senior scientific consultant at BioTeam, to discuss new approaches changing access to HPC resources and how platforms like Open OnDemand are simplifying the HPC experience for those unfamiliar with the system. They also share their thoughts on the future...

As the new year settles in, the industry is anticipating new innovative biotech and learning from past failures. John Keilty, venture partner at Third Rock Ventures, discusses the current trends he sees in biopharma investment, separating the hype from reality of AI (and if the AI bubble will eventually pop), other ventures that should be considered, and how new companies are being built today compared to past years in this episode of Trends from the Trenches. With host Eleanor Howe, founder ...

Rare diseases do not receive enough attention for the impact they have on patients and their families. This is what AlphaRose’s founder and CEO Casey McPherson learned after his daughter was diagnosed with a rare condition. In a conversation with host Ari Berman, McPherson shares how he switched from music to founding his own pharmaceutical company, what technologies AlphaRose is developing, and how his company is creating environments that allow innovation and iteration. He also shares his t...

David Hewlett, founder of Tech Bandits, makes learning fun and creates an environment where children—the future generation of scientists—can feel comfortable with curiosity. With host Ari Berman, Hewlett delves into his acting career, which consists of a wide range of scientist roles, and the origins of Tech Bandits. He also shares his thoughts on how science needs to be communicated better (and why scientists need to know how to present their work to the world), what technology can help with...

In this special transition episode of Trends from the Trenches, Ari Berman, CEO of BioTeam, takes the mic as the new host of the Trends from the Trenches podcast and speaks with founding host Stan Gloss, co-founder of BioTeam. During their conversation, they cover Stan’s journey as an entrepreneur, including the valuable lessons learned along the way, words of wisdom for people on similar paths, and what he is most proud of during his time at the company. Stan also discusses the impact dyslex...

In the first Trends from the Trenches episode of 2025, host Stan Gloss and Dirk Petersen, Director of Supercomputing Center at Oregon State University, talk about the state and role of HPCs in a world that’s focused on AI. Petersen offers his thoughts and insights on working with AI teams, how to converge the traditional HPC user with the AI user, the “Wild West” of AI infrastructure and computing power, and how AI is driving a renaissance in scientific computing and high-performance computin...